Big Eyes (2014), directed by Tim Burton, is a film based on the true story of Walter and Margaret Keane in the fifties and sixties. Margaret leaves her first husband and takes off to North Beach in San Francisco with her daughter which was not common in this time period. She gets a job painting at a furniture company working with all men. She also was shown selling her paintings in the park where she paints a young boy for only one dollar. Conveniently she meets Walter Keane at this time in her life when he was selling his street paintings next to her. The two fall for each other, at the time her ex-husband is trying to take her daughter Jane. Because she lacks a proper home, being raised by a single mother. There is a risk Margaret will lose custody so Walter proposes to Margaret and they got to Hawaii to be married.
Margaret Keane painted children with large eyes, and explained “I believe you can see things in the eyes, the eyes are the window to the soul”. Meanwhile, Walter Keane painted street scenes which the art gallery told him they didn’t want. Walter then pulls out the big eye paintings and goes onto rent a wall in jazz club to display them. A woman asks who is the artist is in front of Margaret, and Walter takes the credit, selling a painting for 5,000 he then opens his own gallery. I thought this was a strong scene because it showed us how Margaret had lost control. When the woman asked who the artist was she stood there with a blank face and let him take the credit without stopping him.
Margaret feels bad for lying to Jane about who does the paintings so she goes to confess her sins. She tells the priest she had lied to her child and the priest tells her “you were raised Christian, you know what we are taught, the man is the head of the household, perhaps you should trust his judgement.” Even when she was looking for support she was told to submit to Walter and at this scene Margaret started to believe this is how it should be. Walter knew people could not afford “his” painting so he started selling copies of posters and postcards. This is when we see him become very popular.
The next scene shows Margaret in the grocery store passing the copies of the painting and she starts to see the big eyes on the people in the store. This is not the most successful part of the movie because it started to become cartoon-like. While I did understand that it was to show how the Big Eyes were taking over her life, it didn’t fit the style of the movie overall. She is getting sick of not being recognized and started a new style that she was going to take credit for. Walters reason for not giving her credit to the big eyes painting “was people do not buy lady art” which was true to the time period however, the movie did not focus on how intense gender roles were at the time period. She signed her new style of painting with just her initials because “people don’t take woman art seriously.” Although they keep making this statement, it is not proven anywhere in the movie. If they possibly showed us a scene of people discussing a women’s art and why
they wouldn’t buy it, or shown us another women artist not being successful. It could’ve given us a better inside look as to how serious it was at the time.
They get very wealthy and are now living in Woodside, California in 1963 in a large home with a pool, five bedrooms, and an art studio. An iconic moment was when she is in her studio that no one goes into because they can’t know she is the artist behind the painting and her dogs gets in and she says “well, I painted em, I did every single one of em, every big eye, me,
and no one will ever know but you”. I enjoyed this scene because we could feel how trapped Margaret was in the lies when the only soul she could tell the truth to was her dog. As she is her studio she come across a box of Walters old street paintings and sees they were also signed by someone else. This part is displayed well because it shows us her hitting her breaking point, she now knows he has done this to someone else before. She finds out that he never could paint in the first place and when she confronts him he goes crazy. I am not a fan of this because he acts way over the top and it turns comedic. The narrator (Dick Nolan) a newspaper editor brings us
back on track saying “when people asked me why did she stay, was it fear, lack of confidence, Margaret was trapped in a lie she helped create and now the cover up was worse than the crime.”
In another scene, Margaret’s daughter Jane looked for her mom who was asleep in her studio. She goes in for the first time and saw her that her mom is the artist. This was done well because throughout the whole movie we see how her and her mother were growing apart from the lie that was coming in between them. And now that Jane knows the truth of her mom being the painter all these years we see them connect again. We see Walter being way over the top in a scene when he goes to stab a man with a fork in the eye. Although we don’t know how Walter was as a person at points his behavior seemed way too dramatic as I mentioned above. But Margaret was alive during the making of this movie and approved it all so this could have been his true personality. In the one scene he is drunk and acting out, he throws matches on Margaret and Jane. He slips a match into the studio they locked themselves in and the room catches on fire so they go out the pool door and drive away. This was a great scene because we see how she didn’t care about the money or the home anymore and just wanted to start a new life for her and Jane. They move to Hawaii and one year later Walter calls her when she files for divorce. He says he will only sign if she sends him the rights to every painting and one hundred more.
Margaret has an interview with a radio station in Hawaii where she tells the truth that she was the artist and she sues Walter for what he has done to her. At the trail the judge says “in my opinion there is only one way to clear this up, you’re both going to paint” and they both had to paint in front of the courtroom. This scene shows Walter fixing the chair and moving around while Margaret is painting and he can’t start anything because he does not know how to paint. Walter finally starts and complains about his shoulder saying he can’t paint today. Margaret won and still painted everyday until her death. This movie was amazing and showed us the details of what Margaret had to deal with as a woman artist in the sixties. It shows the emotional toll it takes on herself and her relationships when she was not being acknowledged for the hard work she put into all her paintings.
